New Cookbook Features Dallas Chefs

Chef Mark Wootton makes an excellent stack of sweet-potato pancakes and build-your-own-omelettes at Garden Café, the sweet, garden-endowed spot on Junius Street in Old East Dallas, where a ramble outside after lattes means face-to-face encounters with sunflowers and vine-draped trellises and the chickens that live in the Mondrian-painted coop.

In the new cookbook, Breakfast in Texas: Recipes for Elegant Brunches, Down-Home Classics & Local Favorites, out this April from Texas University Press, three of Wootton’s recipes represent Dallas (and speak loudly and clearly to Wootton’s local-championing, farm-to-table sensibilities): apple-raisin blinis with mascarpone and Texas Honeybee Guild honey, mushroom and duck-confit tart with poached eggs and hollandaise, and a recipe for flatiron steak featuring herbed Homestead Gristmill grits.

In this tome with beautiful photography, Terry Thompson-Anderson is following up the work she did in the much celebrated Texas on the Table, gathering an array of recipes from Texas chefs. Chapters cover ground for libation seekers, egg enthusiasts, meat eaters, seafood fiends, pastry lovers, and vegans. The breakfast portrait of our state is awfully flattering, from huevos con migas to chicken fried steak or the churro waffles from El Paso’s Crave Kitchen and Bar that look like a cajeta-drizzled, cinnamon-flecked million bucks. Here’s to breakfast all day!